Thursday, November 16, 2017

The Irrelevance of President Trump

Popular Economics Weekly

It’s sad for America that the President of the United States has become
irrelevant to most of the problems facing Americans and the world. But it’s
heartening as well, because in choosing to return to a 1950’s that never was—the
brief emergence of a white middle class—Trump can’t do much damage to future
growth by choosing to isolate himself and his constituency from the real world.
Do we need a better definition of President Trump’s irrelevance?

Let’s start with his fiasco of an Asian trip, where he fawned over foreign
leaders who gave him massive pageants, but no trade concessions, while
abandoning the Trans- Pacific Partnership.

The remaining 11 countries, including Japan, Australia, Mexico and Malaysia,
said they had revived the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, a multilateral
agreement championed under the Obama administration.

The Guardian reported Ministers meeting in Danang, Vietnam agreed on the
“core elements” of what was now called the comprehensive and progressive
agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a joint statement read.

And “American leaders from state capitals, city halls and businesses across
the country have shown up in force” in Bonn, Germany, to discuss carrying out
the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” said California Governor Jerry Brown and
Michael Bloomberg in yesterday’s New York Times.

This is when President Trump announced at the beginning of his Presidency
that he was abandoning the Paris Accord in favor of supporting a return to coal
and oil energy. But that isn’t happening for the rest of America, as some 50
percent of U.S. states and cities are represented in Bonn.

“California just extended its cap-and-trade emission program through 2030 and
has adopted incentives that will help put 1.5 million electric vehicles on the
road by 2025,’ said Jerry Brown, Governor of the sixth largest economy in the
world.

Graph: Marketwatch.com

And the U.S. just released its latest congressionally mandated Climate
Science Special Report that says 2017 wreaked the most catastrophic
destruction in 90 years with an estimated $175 billion in property damage. Only
the San Francisco Earthquake (1906), Chicago Fire (1871), and Great Flood (1927)
caused more destruction.

What is Trump afraid of, that he fawns over Chinese and Russian leaders,
while extracting no concessions from them? He was seen to spend more time with
Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam than
any other leader.

Even his support of Republicans’ so-call tax reform bills is irrelevant, as
he wants Republicans once again to attempt to repeal the Obamacare mandate, when
more than 50 percent of Americans now support Obamacare, according to the latest
Kaiser Family Foundations Health Tracking Poll.

“When asked whether it was good or bad that the Senate GOP had failed to
repeal ObamaCare, answers were more direct. Six out of 10 Americans say that
Senate Republicans' failure to repeal the law was a "good thing," said the KFF
poll, “compared to just 35 percent who disapproved and wanted the law repealed.”

That is irrelevance of the highest order, and as many pundits have noted, it
is also the definition of insanity: attempting to repeal Obamacare more than 50
times, and expecting a different result.

Another feature of the tax reform bill is that it requires taking away
approximately $1.5 trillion in Medicare and Medicaid benefits to give the
wealthiest an unnecessary tax cut. Therefore, it won’t help the shrinking middle
class, or any income class, except the top one percent.

Harold
Myerson voiced recently in The American Prospect, “The United States now has
the highest percentage of low-wage workers – that is workers who make less than
two-thirds of the median wage- of any developed nation. Fully 25 percent of all
American workers make no more than $17, 576 a year.”

The irrelevance of this President is therefore a real danger to our health
and standard of living in so many ways.

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Harlan Russell Green, Editor/Publisher

Harlan Green is a Mortgage Broker in Santa Barbara, California since the 1980s and economist. As Editor/Publisher of PopularEconomics.com, he has published 3 weekly columns-- Popular Economics Weekly, Financial FAQs, and The Mortgage Corner-since 2000, and is a featured business columnist for Huffington Post. Please refer to the populareconomics.com website for further information.